It ain’t easy admitting defeat. And god knows we tried. We tried every luxury brand with just the slightest of print budget for Belgium. We tried car and camera makers. We tried airlines. Heck, we even tried the (apparently) beleaguered banks. Made no difference though, ‘they’ were having none of it. Bottom line, campaigns were either being pushed back to later in the year or outright cancelled. And, being a free magazine and all, you can imagine the consequences. No advertising, no magazine. Simple.

So, ‘they’ got us for this round then?

Well, true to Word form, and I’ve got the incomparable Benoit Berben to thank for this, we came up with a solution. Push back the February-March edition to June (meaning our grey album will now be coming out on 1st June, instead of 3rd February as originally planned) and get cracking on April-May’s orange album, which comes out on 30th March.

Call it creative accounting for the advertising-dependent independent magazine. Switch things around a little, take it as a man (it sounds easy like that, but I can tell you a couple of our contributors ain’t too happy to hear that the stories they’ve been scrambling to file on time will now only be coming out in four months) and move on.

Move on because there’s lots in the pipeline (a Valentine’s special coming up online beginning of February, a new website by mid-February as well as a photography-only iPad app come May), not to mention our next print edition, the orange album, which we clearly won’t be defeated on this time around.

Fool me once shame on you. Fool me twice shame on me.

Photograph by Ulrike Biets, taken from a series on fog
Photograph by Grégoire Pleynet, taken from an article on the Cinematek’s film archive
Photograph by Ulrike Biets, taken from a feature on Belgium’s truckers
Photograph taken from Adriaan Hauwaert’s grey series

Photograph by Pauline Miko, taken from an investigation into Brussels’ boot-scrapers
Photograph by Ulrike Biets, taken from a feature on Belgium’s truckers

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The Word Magazine is Belgium’s leading English-speaking free media platform, documenting and championing the best in neighbourhood living, music and art. Published every two months, the magazine is distributed in over 500 distribution points across the country.